#280: Flywheels

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North La Salle, Detroit, Michigan

The other day, while trying on my own to hang a heavy wooden
door, I felt a sharp pluck in my left pectoral muscle.

Okay, I hurt my boob. My left-side movements are constrained,
I now constantly smell of Tiger Balm (not a bad smell), and
I’ve been reminded yet again to not overexert myself, and to
ask for help when I need it. Delays beget more delays because
playing catchup often makes things worse.

These have been on my mind a lot lately: flywheels, spirals,
self-reinforcing loops. I’ve told people that New York for me
was a centrifuge, like the ones NASA uses to ready astronauts
for high gravity; it spun me faster and faster, and eventually
was either going to spit me out or turn me into mush (it spit
me out). Sleep is a such flywheel: don’t get enough and you’re
more anxious, get sick more easily, thereby making it harder
to fall and stay asleep. Debt is another flywheel: if you
can’t afford to change the brake pads on your car, you end up
having to replace the costlier rotors later on, pushing you
deeper into debt.

Climate change causes droughts in the Amazon, causing trees to
release more CO2 into the atmosphere, causing more climate
change.

But all these things (maybe climate change excepted?) have
positive sides too. Get adequate sleep and you’re healthier,
less anxious, better at going to bed on time. Stow a part of
every paycheck in an index fund and you benefit from the
flywheel of compound interest. Another way to think about
building healthy habits is this: you try to get off the bad
flywheels and get on the good ones.

Maybe the flywheel analogy is oversimple. There are many more
ways for things to go wrong than right (do I really believe
this? let’s say for now I do). A satellite moving too fast
gets flung toward the deep dark, while one going too slow
spirals to a crash on Earth. Maybe it’s better, then, to
imagine a space station, requiring small adjustments—small
course corrections—along the way, so as to hang in perfect,
harmonious orbit around Earth or Piicea-9.

So: I am trying to stay eternally vigilant. And I will be
calling in some extra help this week with the house. The
end-of-week goal is to have the trim primed and painted, and
possibly the ceilings too. To work diligently and efficiently,
but not to rush. To recover, and recover well.

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